> thus far there haven't been any [crazy consequences], despite centuries of human-driven weather changes.
which obviously is not true, right?
161 karma · joined January 10, 2021
which obviously is not true, right?
@2 yeah I'm all for zeppelins (and trains). It's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of zeppelins (or trains) for this project but maybe they could be used to collect solar power (but do they have enough buoyancy for large solar panels?)
@3 I'm not against sending experimental vessels to the sea and spray water all over the place in order to find out what happens. I'm all for doing some boundary sanity checks beforehand and during such undertakings to see whether basic physics checks out, and this is what motivated my post. I live in Germany, a country with roughly the size of the Great Barrier Reef, and I'm not sure I have a good handle at the size of this country—it is too big. I'd be happy to hear from someone else an estimate for the size, number and horsepower of vessels required to pull this off. If it's a thousand cargo ships, that sounds like an upper bound for being reasonable. If it's a thousand aircraft carriers, then forget about it. If its hundreds of thousands of mid-sized vessels, good luck with acquiring or building, outfitting, maintaining, manning, catering, harboring, and fueling them. Maybe modified oil drilling platforms are better suited for a task like this.
I think my unfinished back-of-the-envelope calculation strongly hints at this plan being not practical. Another factor to consider is the large scale impacts and assessment of the sheer predictability of outcomes for the ecosphere and for society alike. To me it looks a lot like some people just don't get that messing with the environment on a global scale is qualitatively different from, say, watering your 300m² garden or turning that knob on the radio.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Morrison):
The 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranked Australia in last place for its climate policies and was the only country to score 0 for the same metric in 2021.
During the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, Morrison dismissed suggestions of a link between Australia's emissions or policies and the intensity of the bushfires and initially downplayed the influence of climate change on the fires, but later admitted that climate change may have contributed.
Morrison declined to set net-zero emissions or other climate change targets, unlike other world leaders. Morrison allegedly requested climate change policy targets be removed from a proposed 2021 Australia–United Kingdom trade deal and initially suggested he would not attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, but later confirmed that he would.
Morrison's government pledged that Australia would aim to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, but did not introduce this into national law; Morrison said he believed market forces and not government regulation can address climate change.
His government's climate action plan has been criticised as "lightweight", "meaningless", and a "mockery" that contains "no policy or strategy whatsoever".
Market forces, sure.
How much CO2 is emitted by those boats with their high-powered water pumps? How much noise is injected into the water body when these vessels operate in numbers day in, day out? How many vessels and hours of operation will be needed to have a cooling effect? Where do the clouds, where does the water go once it is vaporized and left drifting?
Come to think of it one could imagine to suck huge quantities of marine water to vaporize it and let it drift as clouds over land; thinking in the abstract, that could contribute to more shade, lower temperatures and more precipitation over hot and arid areas, thereby improving conditions for plants, animals, and humans. But, and this is a big one: how much energy will this need? How is that energy produced? How much water would one have to evaporate? What are the consequences for marine life? What are the consequences when the next government decides to cut funding? And what about the salt content of the aerosol, for certainly it will be utterly uneconomic to desalinate the water prior to spraying it?
My hunch is that those figures won't work out and that artificial clouds over the Great Barrier Reef also won't work out. The reef is called great because it covers an area of ~344,400km², roughly the area of countries like Finland, Congo, Germany, or Japan. According to the USGS[1], the water in a cloud with a volume of 1km³ weighs about 500,000kg. A 1m thick cloud layer over said area has a volume of 344.400km³ if I'm not mistaken, so weighs around 172,200,000kg. So in order to work one would think it to be requisite to spray in the order of a hundred million kg of water like almost daily into the air from seagoing vessels. There's an almost constant wind over most of the oceans so low-faring clouds will disperse in a matter of minutes or hours; the clouds however would be most desperately needed around noon each day which complicates things. Perhaps one could move the ships to upwind locations each day so clouds generated in the afternoon and the night get a chance to drift over the reef.
But imagine to do that for a country-size area: You'd need a fleet of tens or hundreds of thousands of not-so-small vessels. I cannot imagine photovoltaics to be a sufficient source of energy (for one, space is very limited on any vessel, and ironically, the vessel's reason for being there is to reduce impact of solar power). You'd need nuclear or hydrogen because otherwise you'd have to burn through untold tons of fossil fuels.
At any rate, the waters will not be calm anymore. The noise of the evaporators and the propellers will be deafening in the air and in the sea.
All told, a badly thought-out publicity stunt.
[1] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...
Yes we are engineers because we find it OK when the poll results get displayed before you even vote—shows how little we know and care about the rest of the world.
you mean, like, throwing a spanner into a machinery we hardly understand and see whether "it sticks"? Give me a hundred planets and start the trials!
Let us say it is not being discussed because it is not feasible. Unless of course we build massive nuclear power plants in Antarctica with all what that entails. We are not any time soon in a position where we can produce any nontrivial amount of solar or wind energy in the hostile environment of that continent, plus it's dark night down there for half a year each year. Meaning the only remaining option would be to ship coal or oil down there to burn it so we can cool air to –140°C, obviously a non-starter if there ever was one.
> and discourage the much more prudent and affordable approach of simply reducing emissions.
This. The entire plan is madness: you'd burn two tons of oil and coal to get rid of part of what burning one ton of oil and coal leave behind in the atmosphere. It is not clear to me at this point if it is at all feasible to use fossil fuel to get more CO2 out of the atmosphere than burning it puts into the atmosphere in the first place. Because in this household we obey the laws of thermodynamic. And if it's possible at all it's not easy to see why continuing to burn oil and coal and capturing the CO2 at other sites should be better than not burning part of those fuels and capturing the CO2 right at their point of emission should be the better option. It is a hare-brained plan.
is where you lost me. Hell coal is projected to get burned by the megaton for another half century or so because China and India have those resources and that demand. Mankind does not currently have surplus renewable energy.
Nothing in that talk hinted at the possibility that instead of opting for a established and proven technology like LCD they'd choose to go with RDF (reality distortion field) displays instead.
I feel being lied to.
* The FROM clause: First, all data sources are defined and joined
* The WHERE clause: Then, data is filtered as early as possible
* The CONNECT BY clause: Then, data is traversed iteratively or recursively, to produce new tuples
* The GROUP BY clause: Then, data is reduced to groups, possibly producing new tuples if grouping functions like ROLLUP(), CUBE(), GROUPING SETS() are used
* The HAVING clause: Then, data is filtered again
* The SELECT clause: Only now, the projection is evaluated. In case of a SELECT DISTINCT statement, data is further reduced to remove duplicates
* The UNION clause: Optionally, the above is repeated for several UNION-connected subqueries. Unless this is a UNION ALL clause, data is further reduced to remove duplicates
* The ORDER BY clause: Now, all remaining tuples are ordered
* The LIMIT clause: Then, a paginating view is created for the ordered tuples
* The FOR clause: Transformation to XML or JSON
* The FOR UPDATE clause: Finally, pessimistic locking is applied
[1] https://www.jooq.org/doc/latest/manual/sql-building/sql-stat...
[A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain.
[Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive.
IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a problem. It would make our collection even more special.
These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.
You describe the popular version of a linguistic theory, not established fact. There are facts corroborating it, and also some observations (such as the multitude of variations in basically unwritten dialects) that speak against this simple view (that I for one really want to be true, having invested years of my life into, but that doesn't make it any more valid).
An Achilles' heel of your argument is that it is generally very, very hard for people using a more-or-less phonetic writing system (such as an alphabet or a syllabary) to discuss speech sounds without referring to orthography, without mixing up speech sounds and written signs, and without hallucinating subtle differences (or their absence) in speech perception where there are differences (or the lack thereof) in the spelling.
As an example, take final obstruent devoicing as observed in Standard German[1]. The majority of the phonetic / phonological literature of the 20th c seems to leave no doubt that a final systematic -d- (as in 'Rad' [ra:t] (wheel; bicycle)) is phonetically indistinguishable from final systematic -t- (as in 'Rat' [ra:t] (counsel)). Yet there is a minority view (held among others by a well-respected language teacher of mine) who insist there is a minor auditory difference. We can test against that by presenting material that has been so cut and sliced as to erase the meaningful context of utterances and then ask people to vote for the one (Rad) or the other (Rat) based solely on auditory perception. This however is complicated by the fact that not all people speak pure standard high German (in fact—nobody does, of course), so what people do get to hear will always be a blend of dozens or thousands different dialects, idiolects, and mannerisms. Listeners are also faced with the task to accept that, depending on the speaker, 'Rad' may get uttered as [rat] (with a short [a], somewhat similar to En. 'rut'), and while the same may happen to 'Rat', that pronunciation seems to have a slightly differing geographical distribution than the short version of 'Rad'. So when I'm from Bremen, I will probably say 'Ich fahr mit dem [rat] zum [ra:t]haus' (I take the bike to city hall), whereas someone from Westphalia or Wuppertal may prefer short vowels in both words. The effect might well be that the listener's 'phonemes'—more generally, their internal systematic understanding of speech sounds—are much more tied to probabilistic aspects and the history of their personal experience than the clean, orderly phonological models presented in textbooks may lead one to believe.[2][3]
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslautverhärtung [2] see doubts about the reality of the phoneme expressed by BE Vidos Handbuch romanische Sprachwissenschaft https://www.amazon.de/Handbuch-romanischen-Sprachwissenschaf... [3] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=47503 and a number of other threads on the reality of linguistic models
This is far from being a foregone conclusion and would need a careful analysis to justify. FWIW Fossil manages to make do without Git's (insanely named) 'index' (what everyone calls the 'staging area').
This is very nineties and I must disagree. The datetime-as-string example shows it most clearly: wanting to sort by full date is only one thing you want to do with calendar data; often you will want to compare, say, things that happened on Mondays vs things that happened over the weekend, or things that happened within so-and-so many hours around a given point in time and so, not to mention the complexities of DST and timezones. You can do all that with text-based strings but you'd have to write quite a bit of logic that will get applied to strings over and over again, or else you can store the results of parsing a date string into separate fields. Dates expressed as text also don't allow you to validate "19990229" or "20020631" in a very straightforward manner.
I think our collective and by now decades-old experience with duck/weakly-typed languages like Python, JavaScript, Ruby and so on clearly shows that what you gain in simplicity you lose in terms of assured correctness.